# Ojeda Rios killed in PR **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 2, 2005, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ojeda-rios-killed-in-pr/324460 "2005-10-02T16:40:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![aurelian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f4b2a3/32.png) [@aurelian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aurelian)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2005, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ojeda-rios-killed-in-pr/324460/1 "2005-10-02T16:40:00Z")
[Washington Times link](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/28/AR2005092802077.html); [Democracy Now link](http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/26/1434229) Does anyone know anything more about this? After hearing about it earlier this week, I’ve found a few links, but the story doesn’t seem to have received much coverage. Why did the FBI attack him now? (He has been living underground for the past 15 years.) Why was the house blocked off after the shooting? Is there any merit to the rumors that the date (September 23, the Grito de Lares) of the shooting was deliberate? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [October 2, 2005, 8:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ojeda-rios-killed-in-pr/324460/2 "2005-10-02T20:27:50Z")
I don’t know anything about the Ojeda Rios killing, but I’m a little peeved that we’d kill a guy in Puerto Rico because he was wanted for a bank robbery, while simultaneously refusing to deport the notorious [Luis Posada](http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12758164.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp) to anywhere he can be tried for his alleged acts of terrorism. The really rich part about the second one is that the judge ruled we can’t get rid of Posada because we’re afraid he might be tortured: > [@](#): > > Immigration judge William Abbott ruled that Posada will not be deported to Venezuela because Abbott believes Venezuela would likely torture him – a claim Venezuela has vehemently denied. […] Abbott issued the ruling just hours after the government rested its case against Posada Monday. "The most heinous terrorist or mass murderer would qualify for deferral of removal if he or she could establish . . . the probability of torture in the future.’’ I mean, it’s nice that we’re suddenly all concerned about the possibility of terrorist suspects (at least anti-Cuban terrorist suspects) being tortured, but where was this concern when we were “extraordinary rendering” Muslim suspects to be tortured in other countries, not to mention doing some torture of our own? Sorry for the hijack. Don’t know squat about the late Ojeda Rios or the circumstances of his death, sorry. Carry on. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2005, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ojeda-rios-killed-in-pr/324460/3 "2005-10-11T16:03:31Z")
Recently posted article in the _Nation_: [The Killing of Filiberto Ojeda Ríos](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051024/jimenez) Looks like the circumstances of the killing were at best somewhat discreditable: > [@](#): > > Armed with a federal arrest warrant, the agents contend that they found the fugitive armed. “He started the whole thing. He fired first and wounded an agent,” said the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge Luis Fraticelli. Ojeda Ríos’s widow, Elma Beatriz Rosado Barbosa, who was briefly detained by agents at the house and then released, has countered that the FBI contingent entered the house firing. Apparently the bureau contemplated neither Ojeda Ríos’s surrender nor his survival. The wounded agent was airlifted to a hospital. Ojeda was not. Special Agent Fraticelli said the FBI “feared explosives might be present in the house” and waited eighteen hours after they shot Ojeda Ríos for “fresh agents to arrive in a flight from Quantico to attempt a tactical entrance to the hideout.” The autopsy performed on Ojeda Ríos’s body revealed that his wound was not life-threatening and that he could have survived if he had received proper medical attention. Instead, he slowly bled to death. Amnesty International suggested that the killing had the blueprint of an “extrajudicial execution.” > > Puerto Rican independence leaders termed the FBI intervention “a shameful spectacle, an unconscionable show of force” against the popular hero, but on this politically divided island even hard-line statehood advocates such as Resident Commissioner Luis Fortuno, along with pro-Commonwealth Governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, have aggressively chastised the FBI for its “highly irregular” procedures. The governor formally asked Washington for a thorough internal investigation and vowed to conduct his own. The three Puerto Rican members of Congress, Representatives Luis Gutierrez from Illinois and José Serrano and Nydia Velazquez from New York, also pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller for an investigation. Mueller personally called Governor Acevedo Vilá to confirm that he had asked the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General to conduct an “independent review” of the matter. An FBI spokesman added, however, “We have every reason to believe the agents acted properly.” […] > > A monumental FBI mistake forged an instant monument for Puerto Rican independence. Their blunder may be the spark that reactivates the dormant pro-independence camp, whose electoral presence had dwindled to just 2.7 percent in the 2004 elections. Independence leaders now look forward to a stronger showing in future polls. […] > > Even before its official announcement, Ojeda Ríos’s death prompted massive protests. […] Just as they did at an inpromptu gathering the day Ojeda Ríos died, thousands joined in a seven-hour motorcade on September 27, the day of his funeral, singing the Puerto Rican revolutionary hymn and shouting anti-US slogans. Scores of banners reflected popular anger: FEDERAL AGENTS=ASSASSINS; FBI: HERE YOU GO KILLING AGAIN; KILL FEDERAL PIGS. If the FBI did not execute him deliberately, at the very least they let him bleed to death without medical care in a fairly ham-handed attempt at arrest that turned into a focal point for renewed outrage and militancy on the part of the very political groups they were trying to discourage. I’m not sure it was worth it for the sake of apprehending a man in his seventies for jumping bail fifteen years ago.